Wagner's marathon Ring cycle has recently been given the cartoon-strip treatment (at Covent Garden), some gritty Gorbals realism (in Scotland) and proto-Harry Potterish wizardry (both). Now, in the incongruously rococo surroundings of the refurbished Coliseum, we have The Ring as dumbed-down soap opera.

Meet the Wotans: an everyday story of godly folk.

If, as with Shakespeare, every new Ring must to some extent reflect its own age - a worthy but dubious aspiration - Phyllida Lloyd's vision for English National Opera zeroes in on the shallowness, the sheer banality of our contemporary culture. Her Valhalla (designed by Richard Hudson) is a cramped, Ikea-type flat with en suite bathroom, in which the bath is given a multiple, nay starring, role. Her top gods are a cross between the Windsors and the Blairs - a dysfunctional, me-first family incapable of getting anything right, entirely dependent on smarter underlings, while eager to aggrandise themselves in all available photo-opportunities.

The Rhinemaidens are leggy pole-dancers, the Giants hard-hat Bob the Builders, the lesser gods hoodlums in shellsuits and baseball caps, the Nibelungs nerds in orange overalls. Only the cigarette-toting Loge, with his shades, skullcap and leather jacket, personifies contemporary cool; while sorting out the fine mess Wotan has got himself into, he doubles as policy wonk and spin doctor.

Such is Lloyd's mise en scène for Rhinegold, the two-and-a-half-hour prelude to another 15 hours of music-myth over three more operas, to follow over the next year and more. So these are early days yet. But the price of bringing Wagner down to earth, an otherwise attractive proposition, is the loss of the grandeur, majesty and sweep of his epic (if half-barmy) vision of life's verities, as painstakingly built into his sumptuous score.

So Robert Hayward's Wotan, whom we first behold in his bath, carries little of the command he did in the preparatory concert performances, which raised such high expectations. His is an awkward stage presence, somehow cramping his throaty, over-enunciated bass. The same is true of Susan Parry as his wife Fricka, glorious of voice but arch of gesture and movement, as is her sister Freia (Claire Weston). Maybe time will help them relax into their roles as unaffectedly as Gerard O'Connor, whose tattooed thug of a Fafner bodes well for future episodes.

As do the two star turns of this first instalment: Andrew Shore's wily, menacing Alberich and Tom Randle's stylishly sleazy Loge. Darren Jeffery's club bouncer of a Donner also sounded authentically Wagnerian, as did Patricia Bardon's Erda in a surprise appearance from mid-stalls. Which is more than can be said, alas, of Paul Daniel's house orchestra, which started with horrendous uncertainty, especially among the wind, only gradually growing into a pale shadow of its potent self in the Barbican's more helpful acoustic.

Which also did more favours to Jeremy Sams's demotic new translation, of which perhaps half could be heard in the Coliseum's best seats. If they hadn't done their homework, which is always advisable but should never be necessary, Wagner virgins wouldn't have had the first clue what was going on. So, while anxiously wishing this bold venture well, I must again make myself unpopular by calling for sur-titles above opera in English - as in all other major houses and concert-halls. Or what, frankly, is the point of doing it, when titles make it easier to follow elsewhere in the language for which it was written?

A week offering recitals by Maxim Vengerov and Maurizio Pollini would usually be a cause for unalloyed rejoicing. But we professional music-goers, cumulatively, get spoilt, which gives us a nasty tendency to nitpick.

Vengerov's violin is the Stradivarius once owned by Kreutzer, which lent an extra dimension to his sleigh ride through Beethoven's sonata of that name, even if history shows that its dedicatee never actually played the piece. Nor did Vengerov, really, so much as turning it into performance art, making every note a jaw-dropping event for a largely complaisant audience in the palm of his supple hand.

There is no doubting Vengerov's remarkable technical expertise, his ability to lurch from melting piano to thrilling forte at the flick of a wrist, to milk this majestic music for every nuance unavailable to lesser players. But that is also becoming his problem, as further evidenced in his histrionic approach to Bach's first sonata and Brahms's second. Here are three works of subtly different periods, mood and character; yet all were reduced to mere showcases for Vengerov's technical trickery, vehicles for exhibitionism more than musicianship. Not yet 30, he is in danger of turning into a Cecilia Bartoli of the fiddle.

Pollini, now in his early sixties, offered a contrasting object lesson in what can happen to virtuosi after too many years of indiscriminate homage. His Beethoven was surprisingly bland, the Pathétique as patchy, at times shapeless, as the less familiar third sonata in D. For all his devilish dexterity, his ability to wring molten poetry from the calmer passages, he started as he meant to go on : pell-mell, heedless of dynamic detail, as if in a hurry to get it all over with, apparently through some rather un-Italian reluctance to indulge Beethoven's heart-on-sleeve romanticism.

Or was he just more in the mood for Chopin? The 24 Preludes, Op 28, brought out the very best in this paradoxical pianist, his feathery touch and masterly control lending a rare, other-worldly quality to No. 15 in D flat, and a fine fury to No. 16 in B flat minor. For once, Pollini managed to demonstrate the serial logic behind this often random-sounding series of preludes to_ well, more preludes, ending the final D minor allegro with all the emphatic passion his Beethoven had so curiously lacked. Even more wondrous, if possible, were the bounding 'Ballade' and ethereal 'Etudes' he offered as encores.

Perhaps Vengerov can be persuaded to calm down and Pollini to lighten up. That way, we could savour the very best that their consummate, if quixotic, skills have to offer.